Facts speak louder than statistics

Saturday, 22 December 2012

. When people discuss politics they will say politicians are stupid and they mention the so called failed policies of the politicians in question.Politicians aren't stupid. Substitute 'stupid' with 'con artist' and you'll have a more accurate picture of what they are doing. They know full well the cconsequences of their actions. The results may seem stupid because voters are expecting a specific result i.e. economic recovery.The politicians behind those policies are expecting something else all together and something that will benefit them.They are scamming us and people dismiss it by calling them stupid which in itself is stupid unfortunately.If an email money con artist or corrupt investment broker ripped you off you wouldn't call them stupid so why do people call politicians stupid when often they are doing the same thing?Yes, what the politicians are doing is all legal and above board and the other con artist types are not but either way you end up out of pocket and they end up richer..

Thursday, 9 August 2012

Debt
to GDP is misleading, your personal debt can't be measured against a
collective measure such as the GDP so why should a governments debt be matched
against it?

The figures shown are reasonable approximates due to conflicting numbers on
various reports. And since I do not trust the Democrats accounting methods I'm
certainly not relying on their official reports.

Shown on the graph below is the United States yearly GDP, The amount of debt
so far and the amount of the governments’ yearly income.

The debt is usually referred to as around 101% of the GDP. It is actually
nearly seven years’ worth of government revenue and costing the US $1.2 Billion
Daily a day in interest.

Countries like Greece, the UK, Ireland and Italy to name a few also have
massively high debts and look at where they are now. The UK and the US are
teetering on economic disaster and the others have had to be bailed out and are
slashing services and pushing the cost of these disastrous debts onto their
citizens, many of whom are in the process of losing everything. everything..

Wednesday, 6 June 2012

.With accounting there are some very creative ways of presenting information in a way that can make something bad seem not so bad.

One of these creative ways of accounting that is accepted by reputable financial institutions and experts everywhere is the government debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measurement.This method is actually considered quite acceptable to use but isn’t the best representation of how things really are.I have selected Australia and United States for this to help demonstrate how this creative accounting is used and what the real picture is. Both are major economies and one has a supposedly low (but growing) debt and the other has a definitely massive (and growing) debt.The figures used are approximates as various sites list the figures with some variation on the amounts. The amounts used however are close enough to help get the point I want to convey across.In Australia the debt to GDP comparison is around 30% of GDP (and rising fast).That puts Australia’s debt at around $250 billion compared to a GDP of around $1.23 trillion.Doesn’t sound too bad does it?The United States debt is around 15 trillion (and rising fast) compared to a GDP of $14.58 Trillion. It’s slightly over 100% of GDP.Not good but not hopeless right?And remember, this is the accepted and respectable way of gauging government debt and helping show possible impacts on the economies in question.Thing is governments do not possess their countries entire yearly GDP, the governments actual revenue stream is only a small portion of it.From the Australian GDP of around $1.23 trillion the Australian federal government ends up with around $250 billion.From the United States GDP of around $14.58 trillion the United States federal government ends up with around $2.6 trillion.A debt to revenue stream measurement is a much more realistic way of measuring debt. After all if you borrow money the amount you can borrow is measured against your own income which is the revenue stream at your disposal, not, for example, against a combined income figure such as the income of your neighbourhood or of the company you work for.A GDP is a combined national income figure. Since no one person or entity has that combined amount at their disposal no one person, entity’s or governments borrowings should be measured against it.Based on an actual ‘revenue in possession’ measurement Australia’s federal government debt is at 100% of actual revenue and the United States federal debt is around 500%.Now the debts sound worse than the previously mentioned measurements against GDP don’t they? That’s because it is a more realistic presentation of the debts and of the real impact on their countries economies.Which is more realistic and paints an honest picture of the current fiscal situation?The Australian annual interest payments of over $5 billion measured against the GDP of $1.23 trillion or the Australian governments’ actual revenue of $250 billion?And for the United States, annual interest payments of over $148 billion measured against the GDP of $14.58 trillion or the United States governments’ actual revenue of $2.6 trillion?And that’s the interest only, to reduce the actual debt it costs much more.Now what do you think the real impact is of the borrowings of governments is having on their nations’ economies and the world’s economy in general?How many problems in Australia such as hospital waiting lists could $5 billion fix? Or maybe it could help fund the construction of much needed infrastructure.What could $148 billion fix in the United States?Despite what some would have you think these are massive sums of money. Sure it doesn’t sound much when you talk in the amounts of trillions of countries’ economies but the reality is these are substantial sums of money leaving with others getting the benefit, not the people it’s supposed to belong to.Government debt is not a bad thing when the money is borrowed to get something needed such as a bridge or helping the economy during economic or natural disasters.The current borrowings however are to patch up a lack financial care and current philosophy of governments who see the public purse as an endless source of money for them to do as they wish.And while these debts mentioned here are technically 30% and 100% of GDP respectively they are realistically presented as 100% and 500% of actual available revenue and don’t include the massive debts of states and councils.Include those debts and the money going towards them and it’s a wonder any money is left in our economies.

Monday, 21 May 2012

“Today’s
debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The
environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and
impossible) aspect of our lives.”

Vaclav
KlausBlue Planet in Green Shackles

Most of
the leading Western Nations are now experiencing ageing populations, declining
industries, chronic trade imbalances, bloated government, punitive taxation,
high levels of personal debt, unsustainable government deficits and a rapidly metastasising regulatory regime that is an increasing impediment to any productive
activity.

All this
has grown over time into a vast interrelated morass of problems which will
require fundamental changes in governance to correct. Simply more tweaking of
the existing structure will only add to the problems. Correcting them demands more
radical treatment.

This
probably can’t happen until the existing structure has collapsed; however, such
time appears closer every day. A wave of sovereign defaults followed by a
severe global economic depression seems virtually assured by rapidly compounding
debt which is now reaching levels which only an improbably miraculous recovery
could overcome.

When the
time does arrive that real reform becomes possible it will be important to
understand how we got ourselves into such a mess in order to decide what to do
to get out of it. Too much government is obviously a core problem. Imposing
more clearly defined limits on what we expect of it plus more secure limits on
what it may legitimately do is going to be important.

In
addition to setting new limits on government it will also be important to more
clearly recognise the social and behavioural forces which have driven
government in the direction it has taken. Without such understanding there is a
high risk of starting afresh at considerable pain only to repeat the same kind
of mistakes and end up in a similar situation again.

A major
contributor to our current societal malaise has been a tendency to moral
crusades which have only exacerbated the problems they were intended to fix
while generating an ongoing residue of collateral damage, unintended
consequences, bureaucracy and repression. Over the past century major
initiatives of this nature have included prohibition, the war on drugs, the war
on terror and repeated efforts to impose or repress various political
ideologies.

Although
all these efforts have inflicted great suffering and socio-economic damage,
probably none have resulted in such ongoing, widespread and ever increasing
detriment as has environmentalism. While the benefits of cleaner air and water
have been apparent and undeniable, the damage inflicted by misguided
environmentalism has been largely unrecognised even though massively extensive
and deleterious to human wellbeing.

This
damage has included direct impacts and benefits prevented as well as the more
indirect effects of repression and loss of freedom and opportunity:

Some
Direct Damages of Misguided Environmentalism

Tens of millions of deaths
and debilitating infections by malaria which could have been prevented by
indoor use of DDT with minimal environmental impact.

Destruction of millions of
Ha of rainforest to grow biofuels for an immeasurably trivial reduction in
CO2 emissions.

It has been estimated that
as many as 20 million people have been robbed of their lands and forced
into poverty as conservations refugees. After millennia of harmonious
co-existence with their natural environment they have been driven out to
“protect” it.

Even in developed countries
multitudes of honest, productive families of small farmers, stockmen and
fishermen have also been stripped of a long standing sustainable
livelihood to pander to the uninformed notions of green
urbanites.

In recent years significant
increases in food prices have resulted from large areas of land being
removed from food production in order to grow uneconomic subsidised
biofuels. In addition food production has suffered from reductions in
water rights, prohibition of native vegetation clearance, expansion of
parks along with myriad environmental restrictions and demands that reduce
productivity or increase cost with little or no actual environmental
benefit. A further direct consequence has been an increase in
malnutrition, especially in underdeveloped countries dependent on staple
food imports. This affects tens of millions of people and the trend is
getting worse not better.

One of the more serious
effects of misguided environmentalism has also been the corruption of
science. This is resulting in a marked dulling of our most effective tool
for informed decision making at a time when it is needed more than ever to
deal with an increasingly complex world. In the environmental sciences
repeated exposures of junk science and concerted scientific misconduct
along with exaggerated predictions which fail their reality test have
damaged public trust in all science. Lavish funding for agenda driven junk
science has also resulted in a virtual abandonment of sound basic research
in favour of research aimed at promoting the existence of purported
threats.

Benefits
Denied through Environmentalism

Ignorance and ill-founded
fears about genetically modified crops has prevented their introduction in
many places. While reasonable prudence is warranted in the adoption of
this powerful technology, its blanket prohibition is unwarranted by
extensive experience as well as our best scientific understanding. The
benefits of increased production, disease resistance, and nutritional
improvements as well as the reduced use of fertilisers, pesticides and
herbicides are huge. They amount to hundreds of billions of dollars per
year in addition to more and better food for billions of
people.

Unbelievably the GMO
hysteria has extended even to the rejection of food aid in a famine in
Africa because of concerns about it possibly containing GM material.
Apparently the eco-logic is that it is better to starve than to risk an
undefined possibility of some unhealthy effect from eating GM food which
is consumed by hundreds of millions of people elsewhere with no adverse
consequences known.

The energy from fossil fuels
is the very foundation of modern society and its rising cost
is now having a damaging economic impact on all developed economies.
Despite its vital importance, however, increasing imposts, restrictions
and liabilities have become a major impediment to production. It appears
probable that we are headed for a severe energy crisis including some
nations with large natural reserves such as the U.S. and Australia.
Certainly the increasing cost of energy is already having a significant
negative impact on the prosperity of millions of people even in the most
prosperous nations.

Although aquaculture has
been highly successful in producing affordable high quality animal protein
with minimal environmental detriment it has also become subject to
increasing restrictions, prohibitions and costs imposed on the basis of
ill-founded environmental concerns. At the same time recent large
scale clinical and epidemiological studies have found strong correlation
between increased seafood consumption and significant health benefits.
These encompass a broad spectrum of major disorders including
cardiovascular diseases, a variety of immune related disorders and
neurological development and functioning. There is strong indication that
increased seafood consumption in most Western nations could save billions
of dollars annually in health care costs along with a greatly improved
quality of life for tens of millions of people. Although globally there is
limited potential for further increasing production in wild caught
fisheries, there is great potential for expanded aquaculture. The only
real impediment is misguided environmentalism.

Repression
and loss of freedom and opportunity imposed by environmentalism

Hunting, fishing and camping
for recreational and food supplementation purposes have long been healthy
activities open to people of all ages and social classes. Over the
past few decades, however, increasingly harsh, restrictive, complex and
costly regulations enacted under the banner of environmental management
have taken much of the fun as well as the affordability out of these
activities.

Strong property rights have
been a core element of long standing in the development of Western
democracies. A person’s home has been their castle and private property
was indeed private. However, that is now history. The new eco-fascism is
busy imposing myriad restrictions and demands regarding what one can,
cannot and must do on one’s own land. Land ownership is becoming more a
matter of onerous, ever increasing and arbitrary obligations than of any
secure rights. Land holding is effectually in the process of being
transformed into a new form of serfdom with the state as the true owner
and the liege lord to whom all obligations must be paid and permissions
sought.

For millennia fishermen were
among the freest of people, the industry was open to anyone and the price
of entry was only time and effort. The ideal of fisheries management
was to maximise the sustainable yield. Then came the development of
academically trained office based eco-management conducted by experts in
theoretical ideas about things they have never seen and about which little
is actually known. Management claims have expanded to include the
entire marine ecosystem with a focus on the maintenance of species
diversity and community resiliency while protecting from an endless array
of possible threats, all with an eye to erring on the side of precaution.
The favourite tool has become the computer model which can be readily
adjusted to provide any desired result, lends an aura of high tech
certainty and is safely inaccessible to independent examination. The
freedom to fish has been transformed into privatised, corporatized,
tradable rights accompanied by blizzards of paperwork. The result has been
a declining industry with ageing participants and no new generation coming
on to replace them. The rights to the most valuable fisheries are all
becoming the private property of corporations and investors to be fished
by struggling share croppers who bear all the risk and effort but enjoy
only a minority of the profit.

The
inverse relation of environmentalism and productivity -

While
concern for the environment has unquestionably resulted in valuable benefits
from pollution reduction, preservation of nature and more sustainable
utilisation of natural resources; it has also spawned the development of
environmentalism as a malignant ideological offshoot with far less benign
consequences. Environmentalism has become both a powerful political lever
putting dangerous power in the hands of ignorance as well as a convenient cloak
for sundry hidden agendas. That it has cost tens of millions of lives,
hundreds of billions of dollars and had significant impacts on health,
prosperity, freedom and enjoyment of life over much of the world is all too
real even if still largely unrecognised.

In most
developed nations a large majority of the population now dwell in cities and
only a minority toil to produce the goods and services which support us all.
For many urbanites in particular the environment has acquired a romantic,
somewhat sacred, status. Though themselves voracious consumers, they are
removed from the production that supplies their demands. Those who provide
their needs tend to be seen as greedy exploiters and defilers of nature. Even
more ironically, their own lifestyle has virtually annihilated the natural
world in a small portion of the environment and that is where they choose to
live.

Environmental
delusions and deceptions -

The
reality of a constant struggle for survival in a dynamic, ever changing, often
harsh natural world has been replaced by a romantic notion of nature in a
blissful state of harmony and balance, something pure and perfect where any
detectable human influence is by definition a desecration. This sacred
perspective of the environment manifests itself in language where fragile and
delicate become almost mandatory adjectives in describing the natural
world.

An unholy
coalition of politicians, activists, bureaucrats, academics, and the media have
found it profitable to feed into and use the urban eco-delusions for sundry
other agendas. For the politicians it affords a cheap shop at green votes. For
activists it’s campaigns that attract public attention and donations. For
bureaucrats it’s increased authority and budgets. For academics it’s grants and
recognition. For the media it’s the attention grabbing drama of threats and
conflicts.

Like
every effective propaganda machine environmentalism has created it’s own
special terms of emotional index designed to trigger reflexive notions of good
and evil. Terms such as sustainable, biodiversity, ecosystem-based management,
ecologically sustainable development, modelled, precautionary, overexploited,
threatened, endangered, deniers and even the very words environment and ecology
have been co-opted and associated with desired connotations to serve as buzz
words.

A
peculiar adjunct of all this has been the enshrinement of an imaginary
precautionary principle concocted to mandate that any suggestion of a
detrimental environmental effect must be addressed with full measures to
prevent it. Its formulation makes no reference to probability, cost, or risks
and it offers a ready cloak for sundry other agendas. Logically it would even
preclude itself as everything we do or don’t do entails risk, including
precautionary measures themselves. Amazingly, this vacuous and pernicious piece
of nonsense has even been written into the enabling legislation of various
government agencies charged with various facets of environmental
management.

To make
matters worse, environmentalism has also become heavily infected with the
intellectual malignancy of political correctness wherein certain attitudes,
beliefs and perspectives are deemed to be so unarguably true and proper as to
be beyond any questioning or critical examination. To attempt to do so is not
simply to be mistaken. It is evidence of moral degeneration and wilful
evil.

This then
brings us to the mother of all environmental threats, Anthropogenic Global
Warming (a.k.a. Climate Change). AGW has been the eco-saviour’s ultimate wet
dream. In the short term it has afforded healthy portions of fame, fortune,
authority and great righteousness. Further along it promises to save the world,
punish unbelievers and bring about a fair, harmonious, balanced, sustainable restoration
of Eden. The fact that all such dreams of ideal societies have had a 100% track
record of failure is not even a consideration. To the faithful every time, this
time is always different and each time the believers are certain they “know”
the truth and surely couldn’t be wrong because it is confirmed by all their
fellow believers and politically correct as well.

Ecology
is above all holistic -

Every
organism must have effects in order to exist. We are no exception. Aiming to
maximise our beneficial effects and minimise our detrimental ones requires
trade-offs and adjustments whereby we seek to spread our impacts across our
whole resource base within the bounds of sustainability.

Every
resource we lock up puts more pressure on others and makes genuine
sustainability more difficult. An unnecessary restriction in one place becomes
an increased impact somewhere else.

The
reality of natural ecosystems is that they are far less delicate, fragile and
balanced than is popularly imagined. They are in fact much more robust, dynamic
and fluctuating with every organism impacting on others. Like all species the
effect of our own can be either harmful or beneficial depending upon whether
the net result is to decrease or to enhance the diversity, abundance and
condition of life.

Environmentalism
tends to view every accidental condition of nature as manifesting some
beneficent balance but any evidence of a human influence as an unnatural
impact. This perspective is baseless, irrational and is itself unnatural. Our
species like all the others is a natural result of the evolution of life on
this planet. Our rather sudden and amazing success after such a long, hard and
often doubtful struggle is something to marvel about and be grateful for, not
something to be disparaged.

Approaching
the end times -

Unfortunately
mass delusions with moralistic overtones have a way of continuing well beyond
the point where they have departed from any relation to reality. Deep
commitment, pressure to conform and suppression of dissent may maintain them
for some time even when their failure has become painfully obvious. If a
powerful and respected leader finally dares to admit that serious problems
exist, followers are then free to admit reality and the seemingly invulnerable
bubble of delusion may abruptly collapse. The collapse of the communism is a
prime example. However, if leaders have too much to lose to admit any error, a
delusion may continue until mortality removes them or followers may simply fade
away over time leaving only an empty shell of fossilised fanatics.

The
climate change delusion is now in its terminal battle with reality. The
proclamations of the alarmists are growing more and more unhinged from the
actual climate in which we exist. Increasingly costly and restricted energy
supplies are having growing impact on people’s lives. Green energy has failed
miserably to deliver cheap, adequate and reliable power or to result in any
meaningful reduction in CO2 emissions. It exists only because of subsidies
which render it an indulgence we can no longer afford. Then, to top everything
off, the science on which all the claims have been based has been
repeatedly exposed as corrupted by incompetence, inappropriate methods,
unexplained adjustments to data, cherry picking of evidence, exaggeration,
supressing or ignoring conflicting findings and even outright fraud.

Where to
from here-

The
threat of catastrophic climate change has almost certainly been greatly
exaggerated and the net effect of increased CO2 in the atmosphere is much
more likely to be beneficial than harmful. A growing majority of the public now
reject the alarmism. After it collapses, or just withers away to irrelevance,
we will be left with a need to better understand how the science became so
corrupted.

There are
several aspects in this regard about which we should begin thinking:

The current system of peer
review is overrated and corrupt. The Internet makes possible a much more
widely based, open and transparent approach.

Scientific training and
practice is lacking in a clear understanding and implementation of the
philosophy and ethics of science.

Government funding of
research has become dominated by political agendas wherein support is
awarded in accord with the production of desired findings.

Researchers, managers and
activists in the environmental area have learned to manufacture
hypothetical threats to obtain funding. With the precautionary principle
no demonstrable problem is required, only the suggestion of a possible
one.

A properly structured and resourced
science court is needed to evaluate important scientific claims and
disputes before public policies are based on them.

Unfortunately
the corruption is not restricted to science itself. Junk science is now being
widely indoctrinated throughout the educational system. Instead of teaching
students how to recognise and evaluate such malignant righteousness, they are
being presented it as unquestionable truth.

In
developed nations virtually all productive activity now faces a morass of
environmental regulations imposed through a multitude of different government
bodies. The difficulties, delays, costs and uncertainties are having a major
impact. More and more businesses are giving up altogether or moving offshore.
For many who do try to go ahead or who are already committed the eco-demands
result in marginal profitability. This trend is getting worse, not better, and
it is already having a significant impact on national prosperity. For
multinational companies it just means squeezing out what profit they can from
their investment and diverting future expansion elsewhere. For increasing
numbers of domestic businesses already at the margin of profitability it simply
means closing down.

Moral
crusades have a repeated history of imposing pain and ending in grief. There is
nothing to indicate this one is any different. It’s time to recognise it for
what it is, consign it to the rubbish bin of history and begin thinking about
how to undo the damage.

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Welcome to World Central, an independent page presenting straightforward news, views and attitudes. Looking for what's right as opposed to just looking right and presenting the facts, not the fantasy and certainly not the ideology. This page is not designed to offend, the intent is to find the facts and present them to the world.The opinions expressed here are the editor’s and do not represent any other persons, company, organisation etc. The opinions posted in the comments section are the opinion of the person posting them.